Tag: detail
The Edge of Architecture: Cornices in the Drawing Matter collection
21 February 2022
The Edge of Architecture: Cornices in the Drawing Matter collection21 February 2022
By Editors
The following group of drawings are presented here as additional illustrations to Maarten Delbeke’s essay The Cornice: The Edge of Architecture.
Sigurd Lewerentz: Punctum. seeing the detail
14 February 2022
Sigurd Lewerentz: Punctum. seeing the detail14 February 2022
In his book on photography, Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes introduces the concept of ‘the Punctum’. The Punctum is something in a photograph that etches itself in the consciousness of the viewer. It is often a small detail that evokes emotions long after the gaze has left the picture: an experience that is born in the viewer’s… Read More
The Measure of It: An Essay on Measured Drawings
31 January 2022
The Measure of It: An Essay on Measured Drawings31 January 2022
As a classical architect, George Saumarez Smith not only believes in producing something that is pleasing to the eye, but in the importance of precise measuring in architectural practice, that ‘…the important part of an architect’s role is to produce drawings as instructions to a builder’. The following excerpt is… Read More
In the Archive: New and Found 2
12 January 2022
In the Archive: New and Found 212 January 2022
By Editors
Click on drawings to move, enlarge, and identify. The New and Found series is an informal miscellany, which allows us to show some recent acquisitions together with material in the archive or the libraries at Shatwell that you may not have seen before. New Julia Bloomfield recalls a dinner with… Read More
David K. Ross: Archetypes (2021) – Review and Excerpt
11 January 2022
David K. Ross: Archetypes (2021) – Review and Excerpt11 January 2022
By Helen Thomas
‘Artists don’t make objects. Artists make mythologies.’– Anish Kapoor, 2020 Flip over the dark grey endpaper to encounter a black, black void in the centre of the page, like a rabbit hole or a Kapoor construction. Its frame in the image is the pale curved shell of a concrete cylinder… Read More
The Pursuit of Gothic
10 November 2021
The Pursuit of Gothic10 November 2021
William Gilpin notoriously suggested that the ruins of Tintern Abbey could be improved by ‘a mallet judiciously used’. [1] The next generation saw in the architecture of the Middle Ages something more than an assortment of ornamental landscape features, but it did not begin to understand it. Uvedale Price, whose… Read More
The Hidden Horizontal. Cornices in Art and Architecture: Exhibition Review
18 October 2021
The Hidden Horizontal. Cornices in Art and Architecture: Exhibition Review18 October 2021
Architecture is never an easy topic for exhibitions, because the level of knowledge and pre-existing interest of the public is difficult to gauge. A show devoted specifically to a single architectural detail, seen across a historic panorama, is even more challenging. But this is the ambition of ‘The Hidden Horizontal:… Read More
biq: Revealing Construction
26 May 2021
biq: Revealing Construction26 May 2021
The French Modernist Auguste Perret is famously quoted as saying that ‘Construction is the mother tongue of the architect. The architect is a poet who thinks and speaks in terms of construction’. If this is the case, and given drawings are the primary communication tool for architects, it is perhaps… Read More
André Arbus: Details Matter
29 March 2021
André Arbus: Details Matter29 March 2021
By Anna Healy
These presentation drawings – polished, finished, complete – were drawn by André Arbus in the 1950s. They are of a compact, open-plan apartment. Although they are not design drawings, they reveal a lot about the process of design. They communicate thought and care and suggest many drawings have come before them.… Read More
The Values of Profiles (1951)
8 January 2021
The Values of Profiles (1951)8 January 2021
Provoked by the assertion of rational architecture, the beginnings of modern non-figurative art coincide in time with the exclusion from the world of living forms of cornices and profiles, the most evidently ‘abstract’ elements of ancient architecture. At least two reasons may be relevant to this singular phenomenon: one is… Read More
On a handrail
30 November 2020
On a handrail30 November 2020
By Jon Lopez
What drew me to the drawings Tony made, and the handrail itself, is the line it treads between standardisation and customisation. The way in which, for instance, standard sections of steel are bundled together and expressed to form thicker newel posts or to hold the glazing panels of the balustrade.… Read More
‘For the curiosity of the article’: Excerpts from Architectural Drawing (1870)
19 April 2022
‘For the curiosity of the article’: Excerpts from Architectural Drawing (1870)19 April 2022
By William Burges
The following introductory text and drawings are reproduced from William Burges’ Architectural Drawing (1870). Each of the drawings has been chosen for its graphic interest or for the content of Burges’ commentary – which covers the problems of surveying buildings, the limits of nineteenth-century book printing, and his personal curiosity in… Read More
sketch detail survey